Your community and your CV: building both by voluntary work.

I am making appeals in every possible media that young people or people returning to work should consider community work as a way of demonstrating their capabilities to potential employers

It’s a common chicken and egg problem.  Even though you’ve graduated college with good qualifications and have got energy and enthusiasm for any challenge an employer might give you, you can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job.

It’s the same for people recovering from a long-term illness or say, women returning to work after raising a family. In these difficult times, having been a successful parent or diligent jobseeker isn’t enough to impress employers with your CV. If you’re in that situation and want to break that log-jam, please hear me out on how to do something about it and if you know anyone living in or near Worlingham or Beccles in Suffolk, you might want to pass the news of an exciting development in their community.

The community of Worlingham has recently completed a lengthy consultation to produce a ‘Parish Plan’ in which they were guided and supported by Suffolk ACRE.

These exercises help determine a community’s priorities for the next ten years or so. The Government has stated that Parish Plans should be used to “identify key facilities and services, set out the problems that need to be tackled and demonstrate how distinctive character and features should be preserved”.

This plan has identified that this community needs and wants a good neighbour scheme. There are more than twenty of these schemes in Suffolk which are supported by Suffolk ACRE and many hundreds of these schemes are operating throughout the country. The BBC ‘One Show’ made a good short film about them which you can find on YouTube.

On March 2^nd  2010 at Worlingham Middle School, I and my colleague Robert Horn from Suffolk ACRE made a presentation about good neighbour schemes hosted by parish councillor Michael Culyer. Afterwards, sixteen people stepped forward prepared to be volunteers in the scheme, which is an impressive start. Four people said they would be on the committee “if they had to”. But I was struck at the meeting that this scheme could, and should, also be an opportunity for young people locally who might be in the job market, to gain some very useful skills. I asked everyone to spread the word. If a committee of six could be recruited and if the committee had at least one person between 18 and 25 or so, that would be fantastic.

What are these schemes?

A good neighbour scheme is a way that communities can work together to provide mutual support in everyday tasks when someone finds that essential task difficult. It often supports elderly or disabled residents but they are open to all. The benefits these schemes create are many; bringing people in contact with each other strengthens community bonds. It enables people to be productive by giving to charity a little bit of their time instead of just their money, doing whatever they are best able to do.

Helping people who have an occasional immediate need (don’t we all sometimes?) can help older people live in their homes longer (so their simple practical needs don’t burden on the NHS or Social Services and your council tax), younger children may not miss school so often, working people might not have to take days off to attend to one of their dependents and so on. By building networks of mutual support, both trust and responsibility towards each other are nurtured in a community.

If you’re sceptical of these ideals, just listen to how older people long for the good old days when everyone knew their neighbours and people helped each other when they needed it, unlike today, they add ruefully. It worked then and it can still work today.

How a scheme basically works is that a telephone number for a mobile phone is advertised in the community and a rota of volunteers takes turns to ‘hold’ the phone. When somebody needs assistance with a task, they call the phone and that day’s holder logs the call and checks a directory of other available volunteers (who have some training and a CRB check done). They match the volunteer to the task and despatch them. When the task is done, the volunteer calls in and the job is logged as completed.

What tasks the scheme does and doesn’t do depends on the needs of the community. No two schemes are alike in terms of the needs they fulfil but all work on the system of a ‘time bank’, a ‘skill directory’ and common phone number to ensure access for all.

Many schemes offer transport with volunteers driving their cars to take people to doctor’s appointments - for which there is normally a small charge to cover petrol - but these schemes can help all kinds of people with all kinds of tasks. A young man who broke his leg once asked a scheme to walk his dog for him.

Generally, a rule of thumb is that help is offered with basic everyday tasks when there is an urgent need for them to be done.  An elderly person might have difficulty changing a light bulb or a battery in their smoke detector which if left undone would put them in danger. Somebody might need help filling in a form or assembling some flat-pack furniture or just a hand at the other end of the wardrobe while preparing a room for a new baby.

People unfamiliar with these schemes wonder how it can actually work?  How do you filter out lazy people or those wanting something done for nothing? Don’t the volunteers burn out quickly with all the jobs that need doing? In practise this rarely happens and by learning from the experience of the many existing schemes, ways of successfully managing these issues if they arise are found. These techniques are straightforward but require the use of judgement and management skills, which most of us possess, while Suffolk ACRE can provide additional support if it is needed.

Their opportunities

That these challenges exist is my point though; the running of a good neighbour scheme is an excellent way for someone to get management experience - in exactly the sort of challenges you would face in business - that can be demonstrated and quantified on a CV.

You would only need to invest a few hours a month to a good neighbour scheme to prove to potential employers that you possess initiative, good judgement, people skills and trustworthiness and that you can handle responsibility.

I believe anyone looking to prove themselves a capable of a well paying job should consider the useful experience they can gain from sitting on a community committee, be it their village hall, their pre-school or their good neighbour scheme.

There’s no need to take a gap-year in an exotic country while there is plenty of really useful community work to be done at home. I wonder why more young people don’t seize their local opportunities to get involved? It may be that they don’t hear about them. Young people and older people, such as the newly-retired who look for such opportunites, move in different orbits. I asked the twenty five apparently mostly middle-aged people who came to the meeting if anyone had a Facebook or Twitter account and none had.

On many community organisations, such as the village hall or a parish council, you will find their committees already have on them highly qualified people who might want to put a lifetime’s experience to good use in their community.

While this is a good thing, often there is some deference to them. People, especially those without experience or many qualifications, might feel it’s not their place. However, such people are often influential locally, which if you’re looking for a job, they can be useful contacts. And it’s not really a conspiracy that every parish organisation has the ‘usual suspects’ but a symptom of that those who are prepared to give their time to the community tend to be in short supply.

In some communities though, there not enough retired business people willing to give their time, but there is just as much, if not more, need for things to be done. Addressing that imbalance is part of the remit of Suffolk ACRE.

So in the way the good neighbour schemes operate, the tasks and roles of the committee are often structured so that you don’t need highly qualified people to run them. It would be great if you were one but there is always room for people to grow within these schemes. The schemes start with doing only what it is capable of and then grows its capacity, if it wishes to, to do more. And as far as good neighbour schemes in Suffolk go, these opportunities are plentiful and all its volunteers can be supported by the resources of Suffolk ACRE.

My own story

Can doing community work really make a difference to your CV? I say it does with the benefit of personal experience. 

In 1999 I came to live in Suffolk after working abroad for eighteen years as a film technician where I started working in London as a news photographer, often going overseas on assignments and only coming home in-between. Then in 2003 I was made redundant. In a sense that blow to my long held ambition was a relief as by then my children needed me to be at home like a normal father but I struggled to find local employment, and so I scratched a living going hand to mouth doing anything I could find. 

You see I was basically unemployable in a traditional context as twenty five years previously I had left school without any O-levels. In the world of film-making and photo-journalism, that meant nothing as examples of my work were in your multiplex and my last news splash was my CV but in the real world, where freelance photo-journalism doesn’t pay a mortgage, I found that employers looking at my CV saw someone without any qualifications and didn’t understand how my wide experience could be relevant to their business. 

Despite creating every kind of movie magic and talking my way in to interview and photograph countless famous people for newspapers, however dependable I was, my career choices were characteristic of a sole-trader without management responsibilities. People said they just didn’t know what to make of me.

In the meantime my young children were going to pre-school and I was begged to be on its committee. After a while we became frustrated with all the problems it had with substandard premises and we thought the best solution would be to raise the money for a new building. Over the next two years, the fundraising chairman and I, as the treasurer, had to overcome many challenges to raise £147,000 to build and equip a new school and open it on time but we did it.

It took many, many, nights of poring over budgets and leases and building contracts as well as persuading recalcitrant contractors, inspectors and funders to deliver what we wanted from them. In the meantime, I went back to college part-time and in 2009 I got an MA in combined business and arts management.

Although those qualifications might have opened more doors than before, when I graduated I now had to compete with thousands of other graduates also looking for jobs. I noticed though, that in every job interview I’ve had since then, I was always asked about my role in the pre-school; how many people I had supervised and how much money I had managed.  It gave me enormous satisfaction that I could show I had responsibility for all financial, personnel and employment matters for five staff for three years and had successfully project-managed something within their terms of reference.

The interesting thing is my colleague on the pre-school project says exactly the same thing. During the project she was an at-home mum with young children and when they went to middle-school and she went job hunting she found “they always ask me about running the pre-school”.

I don’t think running a good neighbour scheme would be as challenging as that building project was and I wish I had had someone like Suffolk ACRE who I now work for to support us. When I am supporting good neighbour schemes in Suffolk Coastal and Waveney districts, I constantly refer to this experience - especially when someone thinks there is an insolvable crisis - as proof that people with a common purpose in a community can pull together and that it sometimes takes lateral thinking and a bit of initiative to get what you want out of life.

So, if you want to get involved in helping in your community by participating in a good neighbour scheme as a volunteer in any capacity, or you think your community needs a good neighbour scheme, please get in touch and I can tell you more. You could be benefitting yourself as well as someone else by creating a better community for yourself, which would be the most satisfactory outcome for all concerned.

Nat Bocking

Community Development Researcher

Suffolk ACRE

nat.bocking@suffolkacre.org.uk

Reception           01473 345300

Mobile                07787 258137

Questions: why blog?

A reader has asked:

I am intrigued that you write blogs, not being a blogger myself.  Do you know how many people read your blogs?  Is it disappointing if no one comments?  How do people find you, or know if they want to read your blogs?  Why do you call yours watertowerproject?

Thank you very much for your questions, it's good to reflect sometimes:

If I had the time I could make more effort and make my personal blog more like traditional blogs and try to attract traffic etc. but I don't really want to do that. I could know how many people read my blog if I wanted to as Google provide tools for that but I haven't installed it as I don't care how many people read the water tower project.

I state my blog's purpose clearly so people can move on if they land on it randomly. Successful blogs are usually on a specific subject so the user can rely on the blog as a resource and regularly return to it or subscribe to it; such as blogs about modern design or trains or water towers but for me I find this technolgy is a useful way of notebooking my ideas and sharing them. Apart from putting up random essays, I can also email things I find on the web directly to the blog and then link to the blog in correspondence with people rather than send large attachments. Having a blog enables me to do this from any computer with web access.

I don't expect people to find me via the blog but it is nice when they do. I used to put my email address but I got inundated with spam or timewasters. Now if people comment, I get an email alert. If people care enough about what I'm saying and don't want to comment, they can always find my email and phone number. My contacts are all over the web.This blog has lead to me making many local contacts, such as yourself, with people concerned about the same issues I am who don't neccessarily comment on the blog.

I write some other blogs. The busiest is www.bwtas.blogspot.com which is the reason my blog is called the water tower project as the project was getting bwtas off the  ground. I later transferred most of the content. I couldn't think of a memorable name for my random collection of thoughts so I stuck with the name, as besides, water towers are storage made useful by elevation, which in some ways is what my blog is.

RFID & wrong fuel problem

According to the AA, over 20 million pounds per year is wasted by putting the wrong fuel in vehicles, including a huge number of taxpayer funded vehicles like police cars.


In the UK, Ireland and Europe, the petrol fuel nozzle is 21 mm in diameter and the diesel fuel nozzle is 25 mm diameter as standard EN 13012 so although it is hard to put a diesel nozzle into a petrol tank, the costlier and more damaging petrol into a diesel tank is easily managed.


Even when the nozzles have letters six inches high and colour coded jackets, under the sodium vapour lights of a forecourt at midnight, a tired or distracted driver can easily not register that they've selected the wrong nozzle as they are running on auto-pilot trying to get somewhere. The danger is the routine; you fill your Lamborghini with petrol twice a day so you forget you're driving you're wife's diesel Range Rover and you fill it with petrol.

Although there has been talk of redesigning fuel nozzles and filler caps, I haven't seen any measures in use. There are gadgets on the market which check your fuel nozzle is correct but they depend on the operator remembering to use them, which is obviously where the problem lies in the first place. There are some gadgets like this and this on the market that replace the filler cap with one that has a valve that can only be opened with the correct nozzle, the cheapest costs at least £40 and there have to be many variables made to fit around the huge variety of fuel filler cap and door designs. Perhaps the auto industry should fit them as standard but it seems the nozzles aren't all standard so you could find yourself unable to fill up with the right fuel anyway.

I have a simple fail-safe solution to the problem, one that is in use in the trucking industry in a similar vein and which presents a fantastic marketing opportunity for the first oil company to introduce it.


The oil companies should simply offer motorists a free sticker they can put on the fuel filler door or on the filler cap that contains a RFID chip which reports to a detector on the pump (with any kind of nozzle) whether it is attached to a diesel or petrol vehicle. If the wrong fuel for the tag detected is selected, an helpful alarm is triggered with a helpful "are you sure" override button. If the car doesn't have a tag, or it can't be detected, then the system lets the driver choose as normal. Many petrol stations already utilise similar systems for "pay at the pump" authorisation and fleet sales where RFID is proven technology. 


If these tags were given away at petrol stations, the brand loyalty benefits would be enormous to the first company to introduce them.


After I had this idea myself, I googled it and found others are thinking exactly the same thing too. I can't understand why it wouldn't be a big hit with motorists and fleet operators and millions of these tags wouldn't be snapped up by grateful motorists.

Reimagining Norwich's Riverside

Recently Norwich's papers reported that plans are afoot to improve Norwich's riverside, a mainly underutilised area which I also think is full of potential. The EDP reported that "Norwich HEART and the Norwich Society are commissioning researchers to look at how part of the river at the back of the Playhouse Theatre could be opened up to pedestrians..."  I took up their invitation to make suggestions:

I came to love this part of Norwich when I was a student at Norwich University College of the Arts and so I think this institution holds the key to making an enormous difference to the usability of the riverside. If NUCA would allow a public right of way through one of its buildings, which would require extensive but not impossible modifications; given what has been spent on the area already, this action would magnify the benefits of that effort ten-fold.

NUCA is spread over several buildings either side of St George's Street which has recently been pedestrianised to link Cinema City to the Norwich Playhouse with the college and many cafes and bars in-between.

During the day St Georges Street is just as the planners had wished for; a hive of activity with students and office workers from Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Balloon Dog and many other firms mingling and milling around. During lunchtimes they frequent the many cafes either side of the bridge and incidentally, the coffee stand at the foot of the bridge serves the best cappucino in Norwich.

On the east side of St George's is (A) the main Technical School building which still houses the bulk of the college and opposite on its west side is (B) a building called Guntons which houses workshops and further teaching space.

Behind the Technical School building on the east side is a courtyard in which are located (C) the graduate centre The Monastery and the NUCA Student Union.

Further to the west, on Duke Street, is (D) the new NUCA Learning Centre or student library. 

From my experience, on a typical day, many students will traipse from the Learning Centre to the Monastery and back again several times.

The problem is, the most direct access from the hub of St George's street to the Learning Centre and (E) the St Andrews Car Park (Norwich's biggest) is either by Duke Street or by St Andrews Street, which are indirect routes, especially if you are heading for one of the many office buildings south of the river. 

But when you come out of St Andrew's car park on Duke Street and want to go northeast towards St George's, there is an inviting riverside path on the south bank heading towards NUCA but alas this riverside path dead-ends at the back of the Guntons building.

If only there was a way through Guntons to St George's, then many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people per day would not have to negotiate the pedestrian-unfriendly car park beside the Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLP buildings (located behind the Premier Inn on Duke Street) on the north side to get to St George's Street and the Norwich Playhouse and its nearby cafes and bars.

The solution I propose is that the path blocked by the Guntons building should be extended through Guntons so that it would  carry the foot traffic that now walks through the PWC car park.

This would both give much better access to St George's Street from the St Andrews Parking structure and connect the riverside walkways either side of St George's Bridge together.

Then you could walk from Duke Street to the Cow Tower on along the south bank of the Wensum with a short diversion through the historic and interesting couryard of the Monastery behind the technical school. 

The part of the Guntons building on the riverfront itself looks to be a later addition to the main building and it would not be of any significant architectural loss if doors were made in its back wall that faces a parking structure. This passageway, facing the river, would also overlook the Norwich Playhouse and with its industrial glazing and ironwork façade, it could be made into a very attractive space.

Postscript:


I sent my suggestion to HEART and this is their response. 


Thank you for your suggestions in relation to the Parkway project. You won’t be surprised to hear that you haven’t been the first to suggest this. We will be assessing a range of options and are likely to be in a position by next Spring to move something forward.

Best regards and thanks for your interest.

Michael Loveday

Chief Executive

Heritage Economic & Regeneration Trust (HEART)

--

My apologies to Google for using their images. I intend to replace them with hotlinks to their live maps as soon as I have worked out how to do it.

Integrity, trust and management

I recently attended a job interview at a bus company where I was asked to make a presentation on:



"What positive impact can a Revenue and Marketing Manager have on our reputation ?"


It’s very tempting to give people quantifiable answers to questions like this but to be honest, I don’t know enough about buses to make very specific suggestions but I was guessing the purpose of this question was for them to find out what I know and how I think.


The operative word here is reputation. That was an interesting choice. They could have asked me about delivering revenue or quality of service. I understand marketing to be much more than advertising and PR.


Even though that question is pretty specific, my response was to ask, “a reputation for what and with which stakeholders?” as there are many.


And I asked "what’s wrong with your reputation now?" while also telling them what I thought it was.



I have become fond of Bartlett and Ghoshal’s concepts of Purpose, People, Process. If you have the right people inspired by the right purpose, you can find the right process. 


Considering process: a bus company is an open-ended proposition. It is not the Olympics with a goal to reach in 2012 but there to deliver a service today, tomorrow and the day after. To keep a complex system running forever needs constant repair, renewal and maintenance, so change is naturally a constant state of affairs, let alone the changes that rapid company growth brings. No sooner than you have established services and people create expectations, these expectations may not be fulfilled. So, rather than be linear and finite, the processes of service improvement tend to be circular. Like the seasons, good practise goes through a cycle of growth and decay and then renewal.



I don’t have much experience myself but evidently the reputation of this bus company has taken a few hits in many of the cities it operates in.


The Green Party – which has some clout in one city – says that its fare policies drive people off buses into cars so there is likely some work to be done in this area.


What the critics are probably complaining about is that the bus company doesn’t want to run at a loss – and why should it?


The issue may be that there is no sympathy for this bus company. A useful analogy; it seems some people are not onboard with the company’s purpose. Articulating the company’s purpose would clearly be the marketing manager’s remit, while actually, in my mind, it’s in everybody’s remit. The marketing manager should be articulating that purpose to staff as much as customers.


When thinking about ‘People’: the bus company said, amongst other things in the person specifications, that they were looking for a person in this role who is dynamic, customer-focussed and in so many words a leader of people. I am sure those were carefully chosen qualities.

Let’s take that first quality: dynamic. That means energetic and something or someone that has drive and drives others. These are people that push for change. But dynamic people can be wreckers just as much as builders.


Being ‘dynamic’ is quality of leadership. Not many dynamic people aren’t leaders but there are some. Ellen Macarthur sails around the world alone but leads by setting an example. 

You don’t have to be a people-person to be a leader either. Shackleton, Monty, Orson Welles were all difficult people that were good leaders.


I consider leadership something that is not easy to define or let alone do. I could discuss forever the theories of leadership but many say one quality of a leader is ability to influence or persuade - like a salesperson if you will – but then a persuasive person is not always a leader either.


The car salesperson is persuasive in that they will convince us they are giving us the best car we can afford (so we won’t buy one elsewhere) but we never really buy a car thinking we got the better of them do we? So influence alone is not the only qualification for leadership.


But skill at persuasion is necessary because every interaction in a society is an exchange. Communication is an exchange. We exchange our money for services. We exchange our free will and taxes in return for our safety given by our government. When you’re selling something, to win at it, you must convince people they’re getting value for their exchange.


Presentation can influence our perception of whether we get a fair deal or not. Then the question to me is how can this manager influence this perception?


I believe it can only influence and not steer, because the organisation’s reputation is not really totally in its hands. It can’t turn the rudder against the wind. 


Ellen Macarthur doesn’t steer her boat through the wind and waves, she harnesses them; she manages the natural forces to get her where she wants to go.


My belief is that for many things, a reputation for anything, a person, a company, a brand, is mostly dependent on what is actually done more than what is said. 

Some in advertising might disagree with me but I believe that for many things you can’t buy a reputation unless you spend it on the things that actually deliver what that reputation is for. 

Clever advertising and PR can’t convince the audience of something contrary to their experience, their evidence of the truth. Passengers ride buses frequently so they get plenty of opportunity to test the message they hear and form opinions on its integrity.



The tradecraft of advertising or PR can only promise what the customer doesn’t know better or ensure that any false messages are driven away. 

You wouldn’t believe a holiday brochure saying ‘come to Zimbabwe for idyllic safaris’ if it didn’t acknowledge the present truth. You might be intrigued though if it said ‘come and see the new Zimbabwe’. What would make the difference to Zimbabwe is when people came back and verified that promise.


In my mind, the key to being a leader, and having influence on reputation, is delivering on promises. When you have reputation for that, you have trust, even when the message is bad. A trusted source is listened to above all the other background noise.



Trust is critical. You simply can’t legislate around not having trust. Even the most powerful nation on earth cannot avoid having to trust in something. It says so on the back of the dollar bill.


Building - and importantly defending – trust, is what I deduce is one of the key roles and impacts that a revenue and marketing manager could make on this bus company's reputation.


So, that’s the intention, the ambition, the purpose that needed the person. Now how do you achieve it? How do you make and build trust? What’s that process entail?



I believe trust building is best done by attention, example and integrity to your promises. We can call it ‘courtship’.


If you make people feel good about themselves, they’ll follow you and make you a leader. They’ll buy your products. Show people you care about them, they’ll follow you. Set a good example, they’ll follow more. 


Crucial to all of that is integrity; integrity to delivering the rewards of that trust. As I've said, it’s all about exchange.


Trust is a fragile gift though. Take advantage of someone’s trust and not deliver on your promised exchange and heaven help you. Just ask an MP lately.


The process the manager has to fulfil is to ensure the integrity of the promises of the company they represent. I think that was a purpose I could have signed up to.


But alas they went and hired someone else.




©Nat Bocking